Apartheid`s Roots Nourished By Religion

January 19, 1985|By Bruce Buursma, Religion Writer.

GRAND RAPIDS, MICH. — The mounting controversy over the South African policy of apartheid is not necessarily a black-and-white matter, but rather may have its roots buried more deeply in religion than racial bigotry.

Moral outrage directed at the white minority government in that troubled country has been escalating in recent weeks across the United States, with almost daily demonstrations designed to pressure the Reagan administration to alter its policy of ``constructive engagement`` with South Africa and to prompt U.S. businesses to withdraw investments from the African continent`s most industrially advanced and mineral-rich nation.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.), who concluded a tempestuous eight-day fact-finding tour of South Africa this week, said on his return that he would support legislation in Congress that would impose economic sanctions against the white regime, declaring, ``We should make sure the United States government is not helping and financing apartheid.``

APARTHEID IS the term adopted by South Africa`s ruling Nationalist Party to describe the racial compartmentalization in the country. But although the word was coined in 1948, the pattern of segregation has a far longer history in South Africa, accompanied by fervent theological formulas to justify it.

The religious sanctification of apartheid has arisen out of the belief that the white tribe of Afrikaners, most of whom are heirs to a puritanical form of Calvinism, have been ordained by God to rule the nation.

``There is this idea of having a special calling, a feeling that God placed them there since 1652 to be God`s people in South Africa,`` said Professor Daniel Cloete, a New Testament scholar at the University of the Western Cape in Capetown, South Africa, who is a special lecturer here this year at Calvin College Center for Christian Scholarship.

Cloete, 46, is an ordained clergyman in the ``Coloured`` (mixed race)

branch of the Dutch Reformed Church, a denomination that condemns as theological heresy any effort to use the Bible or Calvinist theology as justification for apartheid.

He also is a close colleague of Rev. Allan Boesak, the chaplain at the University of the Western Cape who has emerged as a key Christian leader in the struggle against apartheid since his election as president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

IN AN INTERVIEW in his campus office here this week, Cloete assailed the white Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa for its ``distortions`` of Christian doctrine, terming its continued allegiance to racial segregation a form of ``civil religion.``

Many of the more prominent members of the Nationalist Party are Afrikaners and adherents to the Dutch Reformed Church, which is often characterized as the ``government at prayer.``

But defectors from that church--most prominent among them, Rev. Beyers Naude, an Afrikaner who is general secretary of the South African Council of Churches--have been in large measure responsible for the passionate attention being focused on South Africa by an array of religious groups around the world.

``Beyers Naude has been a spokesman for the oppressed since the early 1960s,`` Cloete said. ``He is looked to as a leader across all the color lines.``

REV. NAUDE, A WHITE Dutch Reformed clergyman, has been joined in more recent years by Rev. Boesak and 1984 Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu as the most eloquent and persuasive religious figures in South Africa.

Cloete, who noted that less prominent clergy are frequently intimidated and detained by government authorities in South Africa, said that Bishop Tutu and Rev. Boesak have achieved a ``kind of immunity`` because of their international celebrity.

The continued visibility and testimony of South African religious leaders, Cloete said, has become increasingly important because the government has been taking ``cosmetic`` steps to ameliorate criticism.